A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

I dunno... for me personally, I've always considered these things just personality traits of mine. I never really liked putting myself in a box the same way a lot of autistics I've seen online do.

My son felt like you, said he would have described himself as 'a normal guy with some quirks'. When he was diagnosed in his mid 20's as ASD he said he then felt 'broken', and wasn't sure he could be 'fixed'. Since then I've wondered about the value of being diagnosed.

The value of diagnosis lies in its legal weight. Without diagnosis, employers and educators have as much obligation to give accommodation as they would to "a normal guy with some quirks": None. Diagnosis allows for the ADA or equivalent in your country to have effect.

As someone diagnosed with ASD at age 12 who is now 35, I would ask your son this: In what way is he *not*, ultimately, still just a normal guy with some quirks? What is normal, anyway?

It's been a couple of years now, and he is slowly working his way back to that. The first year was pretty bad though. He was working with an OT, but seems to have ended up with nothing much more than a box full of empty worksheets and planners, etc.

I'm trying to help and encourage him, but as I'm sure you know, it's very easy to step beyond 'encourage' into 'bloody nagging'! I'd love for him to connect with some of you, so I'm slowly trying to work on that.

For some folks, diagnosis can be a relief (validation/solid reason for symptoms/behaviors, allows them to get proper help or seek out ways to cope & problem-solve in a more focused way, finding others to relate to) but for some it can be a Pandora’s box of sorts. It forces one-

-to acknowledge symptoms/behaviors and sometimes that involves a level of “I knew I was like this, but I didn’t know it was THAT BAD..” (Much like when a person is living in a messy space: as more & more trash slowly piles up, one may become less aware of it or ignore it as a—